Round-up March 14th-20th

The news this week has been dominated by Trump’s plans to cut the NIH budget by 20%. We’re also bracing for the coming storm of announcements/reported results expected from the American College of Medical Genetics conference, which starts in Phoenix, Arizona, tomorrow.

In the nature-nurture debate, twin studies have played a decisive role in helping tease apart the relative contributions of genetics and environment. A meta-analysis of twin studies covers ~18,000 traits and ~15 million pairs of twins, shows an average heritability of 49% across all traits.

Oxford Nanopore have announced the launch of a new desktop product, the GridION X5. It is five of its MinIONs plus a lot of compute in a box, and much smaller than the PromethION. Written up my Omics! Omics!.

Applications

A “good news” variant in PCSK9 is associated with lower levels of LDL cholesterol and lower chance of heart disease. A large scale clinical trial of a drug that targets PCSK9reported today that it did work, but not as much as analysts had been hoping for, and perhaps not enough to justify the $14,000 price tag.

eGenesis, a spinout of George Church’s lab, has raised $38m in Series A financing. They aim to make pig organs transplantable into humans, using genetic modification to combat organ rejection.

A clinic in the UK has been the first to be given the go aheadto make three person babies. The UK recently made the procedure legal.

HudsonAlpha is offering an “elective genome”at $7000. 7 of the first 24 patients had actionable information reported. The focus is on rare disease, one only those genes associated to conditions that the patient has a personal or family history of. The test is in large part being offered because patients ask for it — but this isn’t necessarily good reason to offer a test.

Apaper showing that an antibiotic compound allows some cells to “read through” premature stop codons, giving hope to those who suffer from rare disease caused by such mutations.

A group has reported single cell level structural maps of the mammalian genome, at a resolution of less than 100kb. Some things are constant between cells (A and B compartments, lamina-associated domains and active enhancers and promoters), while some vary (individual topological-associated domains and loops).

Some tumors can be attacked by a combo of drugs that act synergistically. A CRISPR-based double knockout (CDKO) system, designed for high-throughput detection of which pairs of genes give a phenotype when knocked out, allowing synergistic drug target combinations to be identified. Another study of 142k gene-interaction testsreplicated combinatorial drugs at 75% precision.

New genetic associations

Dan Koboldt has a nice summary of 6 studiesthat pin down genes behind rare disease – an interesting illustration of the diverse set of ways hard-to-solve cases are currently being cracked.